I will forever complicate your movements.

Periodt.

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What is it about sharing our lived experience as Black and Autistic persons make us such a threat to the status quo?

This question is rhetorical…and yet, it’s not.

I both want to know the answer and feel as though I have everything I need to answer it myself.

I am not unfamiliar with the defensiveness that surrounds much of what it is I have to share. Doesn’t mean I am unbothered by it though. Just because it happens a lot doesn’t mean I am immune to its harm. Hurts just as much the 1000th time as it did the 1st time.

Because I am not just sharing the statistics of others, these nameless faceless beings who represent the “majority” I won’t ever be part of. It is because I am literally cutting myself apart to show that I bleed. Just as they do. I should matter, just as they do. My life, my stories, my experiences should be believed, respected, and honored.

And many times, they are not.

Many times, someone finds it advantageous for them to not only dismiss what I go through but attempt to admonish me by stating that by sharing my story I am opening the door for others to harm those who don’t know the life I live intimately enough to experience what I do.

What threat do I pose releasing my hardships into the world? Breathing life to their existence outside of them tearing up my insides holding it all in. What harm have I done to share in this way?

The choosing to center perspectives that are not dominated by whiteness is apparently more harmful than pointing out that this community has a problem with whiteness governing its advocacy.

To speak of this means that I am looking for a way to allow others to hurt those that I speak of, those that have no issue nor problem with hurting us. They want me to hold their lives in great reverence to the detriment of my own.

The community of which I speak, and I feel like a broken record here, is not simply the Autistic community, but rather all those who lives are touched in some way by Autism.

Do you know how many of us spend time talking with each other on how we can mitigate the harm that comes to us through therapies as well as life in general. What body is governed like ours in this world? Like that of Indigenous Peoples? There’s a reason we leverage and separate out Black and Indigenous in BIPoC.

I feel an immense amount of frustration and sadness when sharing our story, only to be met by those who feel as though doing so is divisive and an obstacle to their cause. But I have sung their songs before. I have put on their shoes and danced their dances before. There’s little that is advantageous for myself and those like me by allowing our grievances to be folded within that of the dominant group, for they are lost and we are ignored.

There’s no benefit to me quieting my tongue in the hopes that another will speak for me. They do not. They have not. And if on the rare chance they do, it is wrong, laced with privilege, and centering of themselves. Trickle down advocacy does not work. You don’t get to tell us, “let’s not talk about what you’re talking about right now, because we need to have a united front, we will get to your issues in a minute.”

And yet, so many in this community tell us exactly that. In words. In actions.

How do they possess the nerve knowing that the heart of every single one of their revolutions was run by us? We are the pulse of their movements. They stand on atop the backs of those who came before us who look like me, talked like me, stood like me, smacked their lips like me, and didn’t take no shit…like me.

How did I ever allow them to deny my tongue? That isn’t something that will ever happen again. But in telling what ails us, I’m told that it hurts them. A play at making me feel bad for sharing pain that they themselves had a hand in causing. For things privilege won’t allow them to experience. I am what I am supposed to be and I held myself within myself because it wasn’t palatable to those who governed what Autism Advocacy was supposed to look like.

Nah. What WAS I THINKING? I couldn’t have been. But I am not alone in this. Not alone in allowing the few but proud and loud to dictate how I was to behave in these spaces because they had the community in a vice grip. Scared to be shunned. Canceled. Run off.

Thing is, I been there. They already “banned me.” They already shunned me. Many attempted to cancel me. Others targeted my family and friends. And still, I rose. Still, I am here because I ain’t done running my fingers on these keyboards. I am not done screaming into these microphones. I am not done writing these books, educating in these spaces, or advocating back home.

I just ain’t fucking done.

So, I am going to keep going. And growing.

And who gon’ check me, boo?